Yeasayer: "Ambling Alp"

From Depeche Mode's "Enjoy the Silence" to Kate Bush's "Army Dreamers", great music videos are bursts of sound and vision that leave an indelible impression. Director's Cut is a Pitchfork News feature in which we chat with music video directors about their creations. The men and women behind the camera are often overlooked in today's YouTube era, but this feature aims to highlight their hard work while showcasing the best videos currently linking around the internet. A little behind-the-scenes dirt couldn't hurt, too.

In this edition, we chatted with Julia Grigorian and Kirby McClure, who make up the directing team Radical Friend and are responsible for the goo-filled, NSFW psych-out for Yeasayer's new single "Ambling Alp". The Savannah College of Art and Design grads earned kudos with their interactive video for Black Moth Super Rainbow's "Dark Bubbles" last spring, but "Ambling Alp" takes their self-proclaimed "viscous" style to new levels of melt-osity.

Even with high-profile acts like Animal Collective and Grizzly Bear constantly upping the abstract, brain-smushing video ante, "Ambling Alp" was the most insanely enjoyable art-school clip of 2009. And the band were so pleased with the result that there's another Radical Friend/Yeasayer collaboration in the works. Click on to watch the video and read our interview, which touches on the glories of slime, the dangers of volcanoes, and the audacity of nude:

Pitchfork: The desert scenes in this video look spectacular. Where did you shoot them?

Kirby McClure: It was several hours outside of L.A. It's a privately-owned place that used to be a coal mine in the 1920s, and before that it was a huge volcano.

Julia Grigorian: Apparently, the last time it erupted was 500 years ago, which is actually pretty recent.

Pitchfork: You guys were really risking your lives there!

JG: [laughs] You never know.

Pitchfork: How close were you to the mouth of the volcano?

KM: We were right in the fucking mouth! [laughs] Actually, the last shot of the video-- where they're standing around that shimmering fist-- that's the mouth right there. The lava flow from the volcano spreads out like five miles in every direction. It was like 114 degrees on the black rock when we were shooting.

Pitchfork: And some of the people on that rock were totally nude. Did anyone get severely sunburned in, like, a sensitive area?

JG: I don't think so [laughs]. We were trying to keep them in the shade when they weren't wearing anything. Plus, they had pubes.

KM: We only cast people with really big pubic hair bushes.

Pitchfork: Would you guys get naked for a video like this?

KM: We're not quite as elegant as the models and dancers in the video. But we actually talked about directing the video nude if some people were feeling weird about being naked in front of the camera. Luckily, everyone was into it.

Pitchfork: It seems like you guys were inspired visually by things like experimental filmmaker Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon and The Abyss. How did you want to take those references and not just mindlessly repeat them?

KM: When we were trying to describe to people how we wanted the face-stretching to happen, they were like, "Oh yeah, it's kind of like that thing in The Abyss." And we were like, "Really?" I hadn't seen The Abyss since I was a little kid. I guess we were channeling it from our subconscious. People will be like, "Oh you're totally inspired by this super-obscure early 80s film," and we'll be like, "That film sounds awesome but we actually haven't even seen it." We're into this epic imagery that also has this kind of weird, dripping, eerie vibe. Hipgnosis-- the company that did all the Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin covers in the 70s-- was a huge inspiration to us. That was the intentional inspiration for these iconic images that look like posters or album covers in motion.

Pitchfork: The bit where singer Chris Keating's face is getting scrunched up kind of reminded me of U2's video for "Numb".

KM: Yeah, that's the only time you really see the Edge up close like that, right? We originally had a different idea for what we wanted to do with Chris. We were going to shave the word "Yeasayer" into his head so that it would be revealed in the end. We talked about it and he was like, "Oh shit, I might have to go on tour looking like a military dude if I have a shaved head." But he was into it. We were going for a kind of ritual preparation for when she dumps that pixelated liquid onto his face.

Pitchfork: Is there are overarching theme or plot you're going for with the video?

KM: There's this loose narrative in the beginning: These bodies emerge out of the muck and it's this celebration and then we cut back to where they've risen from and you see their faces peel and this ceremony happens where their faces stretch and they sing the lyrics to the song. It empowers these people to run.

Pitchfork: What was that yellowish goo made out of?

JG: [laughs] You would think it'd be easy to create goo but it's this insane chemical process. It's like water and these chemicals that absorb water and some volcanic ash and stuff.

KM: Yeah, we actually had to re-shoot the goo scenes because we didn't get the right consistency the first time. This dude Tony Gardner who did work on "Thriller" sent some of his assistants to help us create the goo. It was disgusting in a cool way-- people were finding excuses to stick their hands into it.

Pitchfork: Do you guys remember the game show "Double Dare"? That was like the golden age of slime.

KM: That was actually an image reference for us. I definitely watched quite a bit of that growing up. I grew up in Florida and people would go to Universal Studios to get slimed. There's always been an appeal with people and slime [laughs].